June 23, 2016

This is curious. I was just looking at a Mondoweiss posting about the potential lynching of a guy who crash his car into a Tel Aviv restaurant after the driver suffered a heart attack. It's worth a lengthy extract from Mondo:

Saturday night, an Israeli driver had a heart attack and lost control of his vehicle on busy Ben Yehuda street in Tel Aviv, ending up crashing into a restaurant and badly injuring two diners, who died shortly after from their wounds.

According to the wife of one of the restaurant owners, Shoshana San, who was an eyewitness, the driver was believed by restaurant-goers and others to be a terrorist. “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious”, she is quoted saying in the Jerusalem Online article.

Let me translate this coded Israeli language for everyone. “Not a good person” means a Palestinian terrorist. The witnesses thought that the car ramming was an intentional Palestinian terror attack, so although the driver was already unconscious, they “pulled him out of the car” as Israeli NRG noted (Hebrew) and lynched him whilst he was unconscious.

Quite little seems to be said about this lynching. It is very toned down and mostly omitted in Israeli media coverage that I managed to glean in my search. Haaretz and Times of Israel, for example, reported about the accident on the day, stating that it wasn’t terror, and not mentioning the beating. “Six wounded; driver among the fatalities in incident unrelated to terrorism,” said Haaretz. .

Ok, so a guy has a heart attack at the wheel of his car, loses control and the car crashes into a restaurant, killing some and injuring others. The driver was among the dead. What killed him? Was it the heart attack? Was it the crash? Or was it the beating?

On the morning after last night’s (Saturday) deadly car crash on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, eye-witnesses are still having trouble comprehending it. According to assessments, the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the wheel, which caused him to run over restaurant patrons. The current terror wave attacks caused many people to think that this accident was a planned car ramming attack, which prompted several eye-witnesses to beat the driver after his car came to a stop- according to Shosha San, the wife of one of the restaurant’s owners.
In a radio interview, San recalled the accident and said that the driver was unconscious when he was beaten “by bystanders, not the restaurant staff.” San added: “I thought it was the end of the world and that I was dead, people were screaming. The restaurant was filled with white dust. At first, I thought it was maybe a terror attack.”San said that the restaurant staff quickly reacted to the accident: “We called the Police and ambulances. We helped people, there was a lot of blood and I was scared.” According to San, other people acted differently because they thought it was a terror attack: “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious.” San also mentioned that the restaurant is still closed due to the serious damage caused by the accident.

No mention of the driver winding up dead but the headline points firmly to the lynching attempt:

Driver of last night’s deadly accident was beaten by eye-witnesses

Now would even a fatal car crash in Tel Aviv normally interest the UK's Jewish Chronicle? Maybe it would and sure enough Josh Jackman did report on it on the same day as the Jerusalem Online piece. Here's the JC;

Three people have died and six were left injured after a car crashed into restaurant customers in Tel Aviv.

Alan Weinkrantz, president of a high-tech PR company, and 47-year-old Menashe Raz from Ashdod were among those killed on Saturday night.

The driver of the car, a 41-year-old from Ra’anana, was also killed.

Police reports indicated that the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the vehicle, careering into customers sitting outside Furama, a Chinese restaurant in the centre of the city.

A female victim in her 30s was left moderately injured, while five others were lightly hurt.

Police have opened an investigation into the incident, but it is not thought to have been a terrorist attack.

Mr Weinkrantz, a Texas resident in his 60s who was president of Alan Weinkrantz and Company, was in Israel on an annual business trip.

His son Aaron told Times of Israel: "He was planning to come back to the US on Thursday. So this has been real tough and real, just crazy."

Mr Weinkrantz also leaves behind a daughter, Lauren.

Mr Raz was preparing to leave the restaurant after a night out with his wife, three children and sister-in-law's family when the car hit.

His sister-in-law Revital, 25, and his 22-year-old niece Linoy Raz were injured and taken to hospital.

So the JC mentioned what Jerusalem Online didn't but not what the latter did report, ie, that the driver was lynched by bystanders. Given that he is now dead as a result of something that happened to him that night it could be that he was actually killed by the people who attacked him when other witnesses said he was unconscious. This was a car crash in a far away city where there are a lot of car crashes and a lot of resulting fatalities. So what was of interest to the JC? And whatever it was, why didn't they report the beating by the witnesses/bystanders? As a far away foreigner I feel the most interesting part of the story is the lynching, not the crash itself.

By the way, the report was first written on 19 June 2016. It was updated the following morning. I don't know what was added, taken away or replaced.

UPDATE at 11:15 am 23/6/2016: I've now seen that Newsweek reported what the JC didn't:

The incident, which took place at the Furama Chinese restaurant on Ben Yehuda street in the coastal city, left two people in the eatery dead. The driver also succumbed to his injuries but it is unclear if the beating by the mob is what killed him, or the heart attack that preceded the crash.

So in a report that a driver who crashed his car into a restaurant in Tel Aviv may have been killed by a heart attack, the crash or by an angry mob who mistook him for an Arab, most media that I have seen only see fit to mention the crash itself and the fact that 3 people died.

June 15, 2016

I'm trying to establish when the word or abbreviation, Zio, became a thing. Obviously Zionists are falsely accusing Israel's critics, opponents and victims of antisemitism all the time but I hadn't noticed anyone try to make an issue out of the abbreviation Zio before that former BICOM intern, Alex Chalmers, mentioned it on his Facebook resignation as a co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club:

It is with the greatest regret that I have decided to resign as Co-Chair of the Oxford University Labour Club. This comes in the light of OULC's decision at this evening's general meeting to endorse Israel Apartheid Week.

I originally ran for the position of Co-Chair back in Trinity, after our crushing defeat at the general election, because I was increasingly worried about the state of OULC. The club I had invested an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and emotion in during my first two terms at Oxford, which had given me a network of close friends, was becoming increasingly riven by factional splits, and despite its avowed committment to liberation, the attitudes of certain members of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming posionous.

Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around the term 'Zio' (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their 'solidarity' with Hamas and explitictly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former Co-Chair claiming that 'most accusations of antisemitism are just the Zionists crying wolf’, a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews. The decision of the club to endorse a movement with a history of targetting and harassing Jewish students and inviting antisemitic speakers to campuses, despite the concerns of Jewish students, illustrates how uneven and insincere much of the active membership is when it comes to liberation. [emphasis added]

For the orchestrated smear campaign against Labour's left and Palestine solidarity supporters this utterly bogus statement marks the kick-off. Shortly after that I did a little post noting:

It all looks very strawman. Let's break it down a bit:

members of the Executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon.

The term, "Zio" is simply short for Zionist and is not confined to sites run by the Klan.

That could and should have been that but the Oxford University Labour Club seems to have decided that supporting the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and other forms of racist oppression against them is a price worth paying for, well, I'm not sure what for.

Something Zionists do when they dare not make a direct allegation of antisemitism is accuse an organisation of "institutional antisemitism". This is how the Zionists exploit the Stephen Lawrence murder and subsequent inquiry but that's another story.

Where was I? Oh yes. Baroness Royall in her investigation of Oxford University Labour Club couldn't find any specific instances of antisemitism and couldn't even report that she found evidence of institutional antisemitism:

I know that you will share my disappointment and frustration that the main headline coming out of my inquiry is that there is no institutional Antisemitism in Oxford University Labour Club. That is true, but it is only part of the story. I am clear that in the OULC there is a cultural problem which means that Jewish students do not always feel welcome.

This is downright weird. Unable to find specific instances of antisemitism she looked for "institutional" and couldn't even find that. So she fell back on "cultural" which looks deliberately meaningless to me. But what else?

Words like ‘Zio’ and tropes such as ‘blood libel’ are obviously anti-Semitic but there are other words in which the context in which they are used is critical so guidance is necessary.

How anyone can seriously liken a simple abbreviation like Zio to the idea that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for unleavened bread for the Passover is beyond me. I'm going to have to ignore the fact that Baroness Royall has implied here that Oxford Uni students actually promote the blood libel without her giving any examples or evidence but what's she on about Zio being "obviously antisemitic"? Apart from Alex Chalmers, I never saw it being raised as an issue and the use of Zio has been around ever since we all started typing more than talking.

Now this bogus allegation definitely starts with Alex Chalmers. Since he made an issue of it David Aaronovitch and the Community Security Trust's Dave Rich have both weighed in on Twitter but never before February this year.

Off the top of my head I could remember hasbara blogger Bob from Brockley using the expression "Zio" in comments in both his and my blog so I googled "Zio Bob from Brockley". I found this post from 2010:

Note how he says "Izzy/Pal" for Israel/Palestine. Kind of chumsy and casual. And straight after that, "Zio/Anti-Zio". Now in real life Bob from Brockley is Ben Gidley, a Zionist academic. He even did a sub-report for the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. Search the report. Not a mention of "Zio". Why not? It wasn't and isn't a thing, that's why not. And if it was, Ben Gidley could hardly denounce his alter-ego. That would be like Clark Kent denouncing Superman.

What about Wikipedia? Here is the current Wikipedia entry disambiguating Zio:

Now this is actually wrong. Remember hasbaristas, Ben Gidley and Avi Mayer? They are hardly Zios With Attitude. Zio isn't necessarily pejorative, it's descriptive. And as for "often regarded as antisemitic", how about "recently claimed to be antisemitic".

The involvement of David Aaronovitch and some huckster from Gerald Ronson's private army. Sorry, did I say Gerald Ronson's private army? I meant the Community Security Trust, in promoting this bogus allegation suggests to me that the Zios are going to dig in on this one. I would further guess that they'll press on with this without providing any evidence for their claim that the word Zio is only or even mostly or often found on far-right websites and in defiance of evidence that no one considered "Zio" problematic before a wannabe Israel lobbyist couldn't find anything else to throw at the Oxford University Labour Club when it voted to support Israeli Apartheid Week.

Now my big worry over all this is that it seems like a small part of what is a very big smear campaign by the Zionist movement against Israel's detractors. Using the word "Zio" doesn't seem like an issue worth fighting for and maybe we shouldn't fight over it, we should just use it as casually as we (and they) have done in the past.

The significance of this is that it is yet another false allegation of antisemitism and that false allegation is being used to bar honest anti-racists from political activity and to even incite violence against them. It's only a small word, not a whole word even, but if a senior antisemitism hunter can bring it up in the same sentence as the "blood libel" then it ought to signal that it means a lot to the Zionists to use it as yet another way of victimising Israel's critics.

Some people might avoid using the word Zio in future so as not to give the Zios another thing to whinge about but to accept it was ever a real issue would be bad faith; a bad faith acceptance of a demonstrably bad faith allegation of antisemitism.

June 08, 2016

Here's an amusing twitter thread. One of its participants might be so embarrassed by her attempt at hasbara failing miserably she might disappear her own tweets so I "snipped" them. But let's try embedding first:

17. She tells us about the Shabak blacklist ppl are put on, barred from crossing. She also tell us of MachsomWatch's efforts to get ppl off.

Now how could an account calling itself Labour 2 Palestine give such a notorious hasbarist an opportunity to use the checkpoints of all things to promote Zionism? Answer? They didn't. Sorry, it's late. I mean the answer to the question, how could they? is, they didn't. Look:

A "little bit of a conspiracy going on" now has the official stamp of disapproval from the provisional wing of the Zionist movement in the UK.

So what was Jackie Walker thinking of when she invoked this "antisemitic trope"? Let's have a look at The Jewish Chronicle. I mean, I hesitate to allege a conspiracy but whenever lots of people in lots of media are saying the same wrong thing about someone falsely accused of antisemitism, the JC is usually in there somewhere. And their headline:

Jacqueline Walker claims her suspension from Labour was part of a conspiracy

Now immediately we ought to smell a rat because Dave Rich put his quote in quotes. That is, it was an exact quote. Where he messed up is he made out "a little bit of a conspiracy" is an "antisemitic trope". The antisemitic trope about conspiracies is usual the worldwide Jewish conspiracy theory. That's the idea that all of the world's Jews are party to the same conspiracy to the benefit of all Jews and to the detriment of everyone else. Not so much a little bit of a conspiracy but a literally impossibly huge conspiracy.

Now the JC was a bit smarter than Dave Rich (who isn't?). They've made out that Jackie Walker could have been suggesting that the smear campaign against Corbynistas and Palestine solidarity supporters is part of a much bigger conspiracy. That seems to be what they are attempting with their headline. But they didn't just run with a headline. They ran the story and like Dave Rich they seem to have run real quotes that contradict the headline:

Ms Walker, who was readmitted to the party after being suspended over allegations of making antisemitic comments, said: “There is a little bit of a conspiracy going on”.

Speaking at a meeting in Brighton last night, she told a 50-strong audience that she had been abroad when she was informed of her suspension last month.

She said: “Look at the date of the Jewish Chronicle when that came out. I was actually in Turkey.“My letter suspending me was actually dated 4 May. The Jewish Chronicle published the story about me on 4 May.

“Now, you have to put two and two together. What you will know is that somebody in the [Labour] compliance unit, or around there, is leaking information out to the media.

Conspiracy? Well ok, but just a small one, like Jackie Walker said.

Now let's have a look at the case of Tony Greenstein and his suspension from the Labour Party. Tony was told that he was being suspended because of certain things that he had said but he wasn't told what those things were. Curiously, The Times and The Telegraph were told what those things were and they said that Tony had said that the Jews had supported the Nazis' antisemitic Nuremberg Laws. Tony of course had said nothing of the kind and for fear of libel action by Tony (who knows his legal stuff) both The Times and The Telegraph ran retractions.

So the false allegations against Tony Greenstein were leaked to and published by The Times and The Telegraph and before the allegations were put to Tony. Whoever the leaker was must have known that the details were going to be published. Conspiracy? Ok, make it a double! Cheers, or L'chaim as we rootless cosmopolitans like to say.

So whilst Zionists can make an "antisemitic trope" out of just about anything, the suggestion that the smear campaign against various Israel critics looks like it is indeed a bit of a conspiracy. I know size isn't important but "little bit" appears to be a little bit of an understatement.

I just watched maybe half of the excruciating thing and all I could see that touched on anything to do with the antisemitism malarkey was Corbyn talking to Seumas Milne about Freedland. I thought accusing someone as nasty and lacking in integrity as Freedland was pretty fair comment. But here's Dave Rich of the CST:

@lindasgrant if Milne was a mensch he would have replied "no, I've known him for years he's a decent guy we just disagree." But he didn't.

So I'm not sure if Linda Grant is accusing Corbyn or Milne or both of antisemitism but in the little that I watched I couldn't see anything else they could have been referring to.

If I'm right, Linda Grant is saying that to dislike Freedland, who many of us believe is a thoroughly dishonest nasty piece of work, is antisemitic and that Dave Rich thought that Milne would be a better man if he simply passed off smearing Israel's critics and supporting racist war criminals as just little quirky blind spots of an otherwise decent chap, Jonathan Freedland.

I think Linda Grant and Dave Rich make a large part of their living yabbering on about Israel and antisemitism. I don't know much else about them. Maybe there isn't anything else to know.

The matter of Jewish participation in slavery seems to be occupying many an antisemite at the moment.

The fact remains that the loan that made the abolition of slavery in the British Dominions possible was the last of the great financial transactions of Nathan Mayer Rothschild.

The slave owners had managed to ignore the 1807 Emancipation Bill to abolish slavery in the British Empire until Nathan raised the necessary loan of £15 million required to compensate them.

It would seem that the Jews paid [sic] a large part in the abolishing of this evil trade.

Doreen Berger

Vice-President, Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain,

Middlesex

Now this was a contribution to the Jackie Walker controversy where, at is wildest extreme, she was accused of saying that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. I suppose the Community Security Trust's Dave Rich struck up a happy medium between what Walker said and what her most dishonest of detractors said she said. Here he is on Twitter after she was readmitted to the Labour Party:

The part played by some prominent Jews with regard to the history of slavery is perhaps less savoury than Doreen Berger suggests (Letters, May 27). The 1807 Act abolished the slave trade within the British Empire, but slave ownership remained legal. The 1833 Act abolished slavery itself, awarding generous compensation to the slave owners, including a proportionate number of Jews.

According to Eli Faber, recently identified by Geoffrey Alderman as "a distinguished expert in American-Jewish history", Jews had once been prominent in Brazil's sugar industry, where, as creditors, they "dominated the slave trade". Faber also cites Salo Baron's advice to face up to "historically unpleasant truths".

Some Jews subscribed to abolition societies, others profited from slavery, in one form or another.

Roy Wolfe,

Reading, Berkshire

And here's what a friend wrote to me about this storm in a teacup:

Have checked what Jackie Walker actually said and it was "many Jews were chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade". It would have been correct if she had said "at some specific times and in some specific places, many Jews were chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade"....so it was an exaggeration and distortion of a kernel of truth....but of course she was writing a Facebook post, not a scholarly article.

To which I replied that if she had simply inserted "among" before "chief financiers" it would have been entirely uncontroversial but still the zios are looking for blood so they would have made something of it. I could also have said that it was neither a distortion nor a mere kernel of truth. But what it definitely wasn't was an untruth or a claim or even a hint that Jews, still less the Jews were responsible for the slave trade.

And of course my friend only looked at what Jackie Walker said in isolation. I gather that she was in conversation with someone who unable to argue that Jews are a case for national self-determination because, er, Jews are not a case for national self-determination, decided to play the Jews as eternal victims card and Jackie Walker was pointing out that with all we now know, the Jewish victim card isn't the trump it used to be.

June 03, 2016

There was a letter in the Jewish Chronicle today which unfortunately doesn't publish its letters on line. Here it is:

SLAVE TRADE: JEWS NOT ENTIRELY INNOCENT

The part played by some prominent Jews with regard to the history of slavery is perhaps less savoury than Doreen Berger suggests (Letters, May 27). The 1807 Act abolished the slave trade within the British Empire, but slave ownership remained legal. The 1833 Act abolished slavery itself, awarding generous compensation to the slave owners, including a proportionate number of Jews.

According to Eli Faber, recently identified by Geoffrey Alderman as "a distinguished expert in American-Jewish history", Jews had once been prominent in Brazil's sugar industry, where, as creditors, they "dominated the slave trade". Faber also cites Salo Baron's advice to face up to "historically unpleasant truths".

Some Jews subscribed to abolition societies, others profited from slavery, in one form or another.

Roy Wolfe,

Reading, Berkshire

I'm assuming that the headline was supplied not by the letter's author but by the JC itself.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the letter that Roy Wolfe is responding to but I have read of Jewish involvement in the slave trade many times.

This whole issue of course has blown up around some stuff that Momentum's Jackie Walker is supposed to have said about Jewish involvement in the slave trade and subsequent attempts to have her expelled from the Labour Party and to rubbish what she said.

Well it's starting to look like what she said wasn't so rubbish after all and just as happened with Ken Livingstone's suspension over Hitler's well documented support for Zionism in the 1930s, people are examining the historical record which in the case of the slave trade doesn't quite tally with Zionist claims of eternal, perennial and universal Jewish suffering. Which of course isn't to say that all Jews were involved in the slave trade or that the slave trade consisted only or mostly of Jews. But there were aspects of the slave trade in terms of destination which were dominated or indeed monopolised by Jews and financed by the them.

"Over the past few weeks, I have been delighted to receive support for my candidacy for Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) from a broad spectrum of opinion within the party, including nominations from dozens of Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). It is clear that many members want to see me elected to the NEC.

However, I am now concerned that a faction of the party are trying to take that option away from the membership. To appear on the ballot I needed to secure, amongst other things, the nomination of my home CLP.

Last night Eastwood CLP, where my family home is, met to nominate candidates for the NEC. It was proposed that, given I am currently a member of the CLP, there would be a straight vote for or against my nomination. I made my case and answered questions from the room. I was then asked to leave the room while they discussed my nomination further. Once I had left, the ex-leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy, appealed to the CLP to not nominate me. He argued that it would not be appropriate to nominate me due to my endorsement by Momentum, which he claimed has a problem with anti-Semitism. The constituency has a large Jewish population. The CLP then voted to not endorse me, before re-inviting me back into the room.

Needless to say, this is hugely disappointing. It is disappointing because I am the only Jewish candidate in this election, because the wide range of organisations endorsing me includes the Jewish Labour Movement, and because I have a long record of challenging anti-Semitism and have in fact faced it on a daily basis since my candidacy was announced. But above all, it is disappointing because I know there are many members who want to vote for me, who could now have lost that opportunity. I am considering my options going forward."

Now this is more bizarre than all the previous episodes of this sordid show. The reason she was slated for the NEC in the first place was because of Ken Livingstone's suspension and Ken Livingstone's suspension arose out of his support for Naz Shah. She was supported by so-called Jewish Labour Movement, formerly known as Poale Zion or Workers of Zion and she was just thrilled to get that support in spite of all the harm they have done to the Labour Party recently:

Huge thank you to @JewishLabour for their endorsement this evening. It means a lot to me personally to have the support of my community

And so to her rejection by her own Constituency Labour Party which was down to the antisemitism smear campaign largely got up by her endorsers in so-called Jewish Labour.

So what actually happened? This wasn't a procedural manoeuvre by apparatchiks. This was a rejection by the rank and file with the encouragement of a largely discredited figure, Jim Murphy. How did Rhea Wolfson not know that Momentum was so out of sorts with her own CLP? Jim Murphy raised the bogus antisemitism issue. Why wasn't the CLP impressed by Rhea Wolfson's endorsement by so-called Jewish Labour?

Rhea Wolfson had the support of the left at first until she reveled in the support she got from the Zionist movement but it wasn't her alienation of the left that lost her this selection thing. Clearly, for the Blairites, merely supporting Zionism isn't enough. They want people to support the whole neocon shebang and poor old (well young) Rhea didn't fit that bill.

I feel her supporters protest too much. Her constituency voted against her and she should have known them better. They must be a very right wing bunch to be swayed by a Blairite like Murphy. But they are the rank and file and if their say is crucial, they are entitled to it and they had it. If she was a bit more deft she would have joined a constituency party that wasn't so right wing. But there's the rub. If they're so right wing they can't accept someone tainted with anti-Zionism they won't vote for her. But if they're that left wing they won't support a candidate who has the endorsement of so-called Jewish Labour. I don't want to be dramatic here but this really is a struggle for the soul of the Labour Party.